“All the stuff that’s done really well on mobile has been incredibly short form and easily scannable,” Mullenweg told AllThingsD’s Kara Swisher. “I think there’s a space … to sit down and read something longer than a couple of seconds. Rather than the coffee line experience, what’s the sitting-down-in-the-back experience? We’re going to keep experimenting.”

Mullenweg said that the average post on WordPress is 280 words long, and that’s remained “relatively constant” over the past few years. “Certain ideas need to be expressed and they just need more than 140 characters,” he said.

WordPress is taking steps to surface more of its users’ content. “We’ve been working a lot on wordpress.com to create an interesting reading experience,” he said. The site’s “Freshly Pressed” feed surfaces content from across users’ blogs. “You’ll see a lot more longform content and a lot more galleries [on the feed],” Mullenweg said, and traffic to that feed has grown by double digits in the past couple of months.

When Swisher noted that WordPress doesn’t link its users’ blogs together — suggesting what else to read if you liked a certain post, say — Mullenweg answered that “we’re really excited about starting to do that.”

And while Mullenweg criticized many forms of digital advertising — “print ads are still infinitely better” — he suggested that WordPress might look at offering more native advertising options. WordPress would consider a partnership with a company offering native ad units, he said, if it’s “something really compelling that doesn’t make readers block it…Native advertising is the most interesting thing I’ve seen. At the point where advertising becomes as good as the content that surrounds it, I will applaud it.”

Disclosure: Automattic, maker of WordPress.com, is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, GigaOm. Om Malik, founder of GigaOm, is also a venture partner at True.

A couple of highlights from the interview:

Blogging has been declared dead at least five times. But that’s like saying creativity is dead, or personal expresion is dead. Ultimately some percentage of the people who get a taste for it through Facebook and Twitter want their own space. And for the most part, that’s a blog.

And from the avid photographer who goes by @photomatt in his social media life:

One of the things I’ve been working on for the past few months is a radical simplification of the interface. WordPress, it’s a complex tool, it’s like the back of a digital SLR … but that doesn’t work on a phone.

Here’s the full 20-minute video:

And here’s Mullenweg’s take.

Disclosure: Automattic, maker of WordPress.com, is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, GigaOm. Om Malik, founder of GigaOm, is also a venture partner at True.

Speaking at the paidContent 2012 event on Wednesday, Mullenweg said that he had been hard at work coming up with a new interface that will eradicate some of the complexity that WordPress is usually associated with.

“One of the things I’ve been working on for the past few months is a radical simplification of the interface,” he told interviewer Anil Dash. “WordPress it’s a complex tool, it’s like the back of a digital SLR… but that doesn’t work on a phone.”

That complexity has become one of the reasons it is used by a wide range of different people, from tiny bloggers to The New York Times, and is now reported to be the system behind one in eight sites on the web. But Mullenweg admitted it would be tough to move the company in a completely new direction, given the scale and takeup that WordPress already has.

“We’re doing that, but at the same time we’ve got tens of millions of users who love the other thing,” he said. “WordPress is really on its third or fourth major pivot. It’s easy to pivot if things are going badly, but when it’s going well you have the weight of all your existing users.”

However, he dismissed the idea that the core business of blogging was something that had been undermined by the rise of Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and other services.

“Blogging has been declared dead at least five times,” he said. “But that’s like saying creativity is dead, or personal expresion is dead. Ultimately some percentage of the people who get a taste for it through Facebook and Twitter want their own space. And for the most part, that’s a blog.”

Disclosure: Automattic, the maker of WordPress.com, is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

Check out the rest of our coverage of paidContent 2012. Full archived video on livestream (registration required).

If your responsibility is to make money from content, what should you do next? If the answer was easy, we’d all be on vacation. It’s not — which is why several hundred execs in media, entertainment, information and technology will be at The TimesCenter in New York today for top-level discussion about what’s working, what hasn’t and what’s showing the most promise. We’re hosting a star-studded roster of digital media leaders, including News Corp.’s Jon Miller, Pottermore CEO Charlie Redmayne; Martha Stewart COO Lisa Gersh; WordPress creator Matt Mullenweg; new USA Today Publisher Larry Kramer; and Condé Nast’s Bob Sauerberg. We’ll talk about making video pay, true cross-platform publishing, discoverability and much more.

Can’t make it in person? Our staff will be writing about it here, you can follow the hashtag #pc2012 — and, even better, you can join us virtually via the livestream of paidContent 2012 here.

Live-blogged stories from the event:

• Content, not hardware, have made tablets the current king
• The new digital newsstand: Enabling “pass-along” — and saying no sometimes
• Digital story-telling and the rise of the new publishers
• Fred Wilson: Content owners, don’t fear the future
• New ‘radically simplified’ WordPress is on the way
• HTML5 is a newspaper’s best friend – even if it has a mobile app
• Conde Nast’s Sauerberg: Get busy innovating, or get busy dying
• Don’t think of it as content, think of it as information
• For discoverability, traditional tools still dominate
• Does social beat search, or does “peacocking” get in the way?
• Financial Times exec: iOS apps don’t work for publishers
• Jon Miller: Hulu still essential to broadcasters
• Social media doesn’t speed up the news cycle — it kills it
• Richard Russo: Amazon puts great young writers in “particular peril”
• Is a vast video library worth the time and money?
• Harry Potter’s publishing wand can tame Amazon, pirates

I’m also thinking about the range of interviews on tap, including two I’m doing. As president of Condé Nast, Bob Sauerberg is managing the translation of some of the magazine industry’s most iconic brands to a variety of devices and formats. In some cases, CN has tried to revive a brand by going pure digital, most famously with Gourmet Live. We’ll talk about what Sauerberg has learned, how committed CN is to app distribution, whether magazine consortium Next Issue Media can gain any meaningful traction and more.

Jon Miller is the chief digital officer of News Corp., the home of tablet tabloid pioneer The Daily, as revolutionary in its own way as USA Today was in 1982, and of a lot of digital experiments and acquisitions with mixed results (including MySpace, an acquisition Miller didn’t make but had to unwind after numerous rescue attempts failed). A current fixation for the former AOL CEO: video across properties, including the Wall Street Journal and IGN, not just the traditional sources of Fox networks and studios. And through it all, News Corp. has to protect its traditional billions and cope with the constant image hits in the UK. The same internet that offers so much potential revenue also makes it easy for every ripple to go tidal wave.

Other one-on-ones include:

• betaworks CEO John Borthwick with GigaOM Founder Om Malik
• VC Fred Wilson with Mathew Ingram, who outlined some ideas here
• Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Russo will talk with our legal writer Jeff Roberts about the challenges facing authors from copyright to consolidation to pricing
• Pottermore CEO Charlie Redmayne will talk to Laura Hazard Owen about taking a beloved brand digital
• Automattic’s Matt Mullenweg in conversation with Anil Dash about platforms, power and disruption.

And that’s just part of the day. Check out the complete schedule and the full list of confirmed speakers is here.

The remaining ickets are selling fast — so if you want to take full advantage of the opportunities that come with networking from breakfast to closing cocktails, I strongly suggest you register now.

Thanks to our sponsors for their support. If you’re interested in sponsoring paidContent 2012, please contact eventsales@gigaom.com.

Thumbnail image courtesy of Shutterstock user [Joshua Haviv].

Sure, newspaper revenues are tanking and layoffs are happening. And there’s no doubt that there is pain and chaos everywhere else in the industry. Radio, television and magazines — all are facing trying times. But as people say, amidst chaos lies opportunity. Over the past few years, we’ve seen mobile devices like smartphones and tablets explode and the emergence of e-paper, astonishing new screens, global distribution platforms, new payment systems such as Amazon and Apple’s stores, and social amplifiers like Facebook and Twitter. We are in the forest after a downpour, and we are ready for new ideas to mushroom.

I admit there are more questions than answers at this point, but these questions are the raw material we can use to write a better script for tomorrow’s content business. These threats and, more importantly, opportunities will be part of the discourse at paidContent 2012, which will be held on May 23, 2012, at the TimesCenter in New York City.

Fred Wilson, Union Square Ventures

In conversations with industry leaders such as Bob Saureberg of Conde Nast, Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures (an investor in revolutionary companies such as Kickstarter and Twitter) and Amy Banse of Comcast, conference chair and paidContent editor Staci Kramer — along with GigaOM senior writer Mathew Ingram — will ponder the future of the business. No surprise, Staci has labeled this conference: At the crossroads. Here is the schedule. (Click here to register.)

Other speakers at the event include Vivian Schiller of NBC News, Lisa Gersh of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, Jon Miller of News Corp., John Borthwick of Betaworks, Matt Mullenweg of WordPress/Automattic and Anil Dash of Expert Labs. Read the full list of speakers here.

I am looking forward to this event and figuring out the future of the industry I love so much.

Om Malik reports that Matt Mullenweg’s Automattic has raised a $29.5 million second round led by True Ventures Polaris Venture Partners and including a strategic investment by the New York Times Company (NYSE: NYT). Previous investors True Ventures and Radar Ventures also took part. Automattic is the parent of WordPress, WordPress.com, Akismet and other projects. The company raised $1.1 million from Polaris, Radar, CNET (NSDQ: CNET) Networks and others back in April 2006.

On his blog, Mullenweg describes it as Act II for the company: “Automattic is now positioned to execute on our vision of a better web not just in blogging, but expanding our investment in anti-spam, wikis, forums, and more — small, open source pieces, loosely joined with the same approach and philosophy that has brought us this far.” He also mentions a few other numbers: 5,880,790 downloads of WordPress.org since Automattic started (3,852,554 in the last year); 1.8 million users joined WordPress.com in 2007 and created 25 million posts. He claims more than 100 million unique users.

We first reported last fall that WordPress was a sale candidate for the right price, roughly $300 million — more than potential buyers told us they wanted to pay (their valuation was more in the $150 million to $200 million range). At the time, Rafat also suggested the company had raised more than the publicly disclosed $1.1 million. We could have been off there — not sure when this round gelled — but clearly more funding was needed to match the company’s ambitions.

It will be interesting to see what comes next. Social networking appears to be on the map, more formal than what is already in place. WordPress.com raised its storage to 3 gigs just this week.

Update: WSJ says that the company’s valuation was around $150 million-$200 million with this round, and some of the $29 million will be used to help company founders and others cash out some of their holdings (looks like CNET might have cashed out…I asked the company for further details on who cashed out, but it is not commenting on it). Automattic, which has about 18 employees, also will use the new cash to add staff and possibly pursue acquisitions. NYT may use some of the blog posts from within WP’s arsenal of blogs, and Automattic may also help train more of its employees in blogging.